First (maybe just early?) "Holy shit" moment in evolutionary timeline?

I assume that for a long time people simply had no idea how long the universe, the earth, life, human life, etc. existed, so either they went with “Who knows? Dumb question” or “This very smart person says it’s x long, so I’ll go with that” and of course more recently, most Jews and Christians pointed to the Bible and guesstimated (with help from Bishop Ussher) a few thousand years for all of it to have started. But at some point, I imagine, some proto-scientific thinkers started thinking in terms of millions of years rather than thousands of years, even if only in terms of “Why not millions? Could that be possible?” sort of thinking.

Who were the first people to postulate a timeline of many millions of years, or even billions for the lifespan of the universe? Were they hooted out of the intellectual community? Ignored? Killed as blashemers? Self-censored? Fitted out for straitjackets?

The scope of your question is a bit broad.

For a our narrow western population it was Darwin. His concepts allowed academics to discuss history without taking the Biblical flood into account. That opened the modern studies of anthropology and geology.

The very short age for the universe is a very Christian thing. Many cultures have allowed for an extremely old world all along.

James Hutton would like a word with you.

Really? No one before him had entertained the possibility?

If so, can we track the actual moment old Chuck D. thunk it up? Did he make a diary notation. “Had the oddest notion this afternoon, that perhaps humankind could be more than 10,000 years old, and lickety-split had a second thought: why not 100,000? Or even a milliard? Then I took a nap and made myself a nice cuppa tea when I awoke, but the idea lingers…”

Geologists had been pointing out that the geology of the earth clearly pointed to a much greater length of existence than the few thousand years that Jewish and Chrustian chronologies implied. In particular:

My sincere apologies to Mr. Hutton. However, Darwin was important in removing the flood barrier.

Book recommendation time!

Yeah. As I recall, by the time Darwin came along it was widely accepted that the Earth was very old. Darwin’s theory wasn’t controversial because it agreed that the Earth was old. Even the antievolutionists, had long accepted that.

Of course not, as others are pointing out.

I don’t mean to hijack, but we’re coming close to the century anniversary of a “holy shit” moment in terms of scale.

Prior to Hubble’s work in the early 1920s, it was thought that our galaxy was likely the whole universe (it wasn’t settled, but that was the main view). He showed that Andromeda was another galaxy, and since then we’ve seen another one or two galaxies.

Another one or two trillion that is.

The Greek philosophers were generally pretty comfortable with infinitely aged universes:

In Hindu cosmology the universe is 155 trillion years old.

https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~goyal/age_of_universe.php

i actually own a copy. Bored the bejeezus out of me, as I recall. Big fan of his PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, but I couldn’t get through that one.

It should be noted that even the early geologists didn’t get the age of the Earth right, or even close. They were mostly thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of millions of years. When meteorites were finally dated to about 4.5 billion years, there was another “holy shit” moment.

Yep. You can see the influence of that discovery in the works of Lovecraft (where mankind is an insignificant entity in an enormously vast and ancient universe)

Radiometric dating of Earth rocks gave an age of 2.2 billion years in 1907.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/do07ra.html

(Of course, those same tests today would yeild a date of 2.200000115 billion years.)

My machine says …11525.

While there had been discoveries of ‘Antediluvian man’ - the evidence of humans from before Noah’s flood - made in the early 19th century, it was the scientific verification of flint artefacts in the Somme being found in unquestionable association with prehistoric animals that changed things forever. It happened to be in 1859 - the same year as Origin of the Species was published.

The verification followed up an earlier claim by Boucher de Perthes, who couldn’t quite make the argument and evidence gel convincingly, so John Evans and Jsoeph Prestwish [archaeologist and geologist] examined the site and produced an authoritative report confirming the find.

I think it was a holy shit moment because, independent of Darwin, it gave humanity an antiquity with geological depth, so geological scale time processes like evolution could be considered as part of the human story.

Without the geologists deep time, Darwin could not have argued that there was enough time for evolution to have taken place.

I assume that Hubble gave the first estimates of the age of the universe.

That’s one person’s interpretation of Hindu Vedas - not Cosmology.

In the Vedas itself - there are many many open ended theories on the origin or the universe / timeline of evolution.